Saint Joseph Catholic Church

Archbishop Gilbert Garcera of Lipa said that the nonviolent revolution, which led to the removal of authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos from office, was “not simply people power; it was people power sustained by prayer: Rosaries in hand, hymns in the air, flowers offered to soldiers, and ordinary people standing unarmed before tanks.”

“Brothers and sisters, the greatest danger today is not only historical distortion, but moral fatigue,” Archbishop Garcera warned. “When freedom is treated merely as a memory and not a duty; when faith is reduced to devotion without moral courage; when peace is sought without justice—the spirit of [the revolution] slowly dies.”

A proponent of changes to Catholic teaching on sexual morality, Bishop Wilmer was once rumored to be under serious consideration for appointment as prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Bishop Erik Varden, OCSO, of Trondheim, Norway, reflected on “Becoming Free” and “The Splendor of Truth” in his February 24 Lenten retreat conferences to the Pope and the Roman Curia.

César Piscoya, described by the Vatican newspaper as a “dear friend of the Pope,” discerned in the 1990s whether to profess vows as an Augustinian. Father Robert Prevost, his spiritual director, “was a very disciplined man; he would get up at 4:00 AM and be in the chapel by 5:00 AM ... In short, he taught us by example. He was very demanding regarding study and homework.”

Piscoya eventually married, had three children, and was widowed when his eldest child was nine. Bishop Prevost appointed him a lay diocesan official in Chiclayo, where he recalled that the bishop acted “with discretion and clarity, without showmanship, but with evangelical consistency.”

“Everyone remembers the Pope as a gringo who was more Peruvian than all the Peruvians,” said journalist Harry Gordillo, who added:

In him you found not only a spiritual guide, but also a warm person who opened his arms to you in any situation. He was a priest who never stopped listening and helping in any way possible. That’s why so many people in Chiclayo say Robert Prevost is their friend.

A leading Anglo-American publishing firm, HarperCollins Publishers, published a book by Pope Leo XIV under its HarperOne imprint.

The Pontiff made the donation, valued at over €1 million ($1.18M), in response to a plea from Bishop Pavlo Honcharuk, the Latin-rite bishop of Kharkiv-Zaporizhzhia. Vatican News reported that a gift from the Banco Farmaceutico ETS Foundation paid for most of the assistance.

“I would like to encourage everyone to support Ukraine, above all in a spiritual sense,” Archbishop Visvaldas Kulbokas said in an interview with Vatican News. “This means prayer, humanitarian assistance, solidarity, and heartfelt closeness.”

Archbishop Kulbokas added, “I believe that the greatest help the Church can offer the Ukrainian people is above all spiritual help: to assist everyone—including myself—to broaden our gaze, so as not to focus solely on the evil we see and experience every day, but to maintain a gaze filled with hope.”

At the same time, Massimiliano Menichetti, one of three vice directors of Dicastery for Communication’s editorial department, warned against rearmament in response to Russian aggression.

“We will need a way of seeing that does not humiliate the enemy, that can turn the enemy into a counterpart at the table—an approach capable of changing hearts,” Menichetti wrote on February 24. “We must hope that this fourth anniversary will mark the year in which the international community stops ‘managing’ the war and returns to building peace, nurturing trust, coexistence, and shared memory.”